Rain Forest Literatures Amazonian Texts and Latin American Culture Lúcia Sá		$26.00 paper ISBN: 0-8166-4325-3 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4325-7 $75.00 cloth ISBN: 0-8166-4324-5 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4324-0
Recaptures native literatures of the Amazonian rain forest. Native texts of the Amazonian rain forest have been viewed as myth or ethnographic matter—the raw material of literature—rather than as significant works in their own right. But in this unprecedented study, Lúcia Sá approaches indigenous texts as creative works rather than source material. Disclosing the existence and nature of longstanding, rich, and complex Native American literary and intellectual traditions that have typically been neglected or demeaned by literary criticism, Rain Forest Literatures analyzes four indigenous cultural traditions: the Carib, Tupi-Guarani, Upper Rio Negro, and Western Arawak. In each case, Sá considers principal native texts and, where relevant, their publication history. She offers a historical overview of the impact of these texts on mainstream Spanish-American and Brazilian literatures, detailing comparisons with native sources and making close analyses of major instances, such as Mário de Andrade’s classic Macunaima (1928) and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller (1986). A redrawing of the lineage of Brazilian and Spanish-American literatures, this book advocates an understanding of the relationships between cultures as a process of “transculturation” rather than “acculturation”—a process that emphasizes the often-ignored impact of the peripheral culture on the one that assumes dominance. “This is an outstanding contribution to the unavoidable and unresolved issue of the 'indigenous' in Latin America an cultural history that has occupied critics of the stature of Louis Villoro, Angel Rama, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Amaryll Chanady, Jorge Klor de Alva, and Gordon Brotherston. Sa’s study brings a significant cultural area and a neglected group of texts to this debate. Sa has written a superb book: erudite, sophisticated, and informative.” —The Americas “Sá has done a valuable job, not only in lucidly teaching English readers a rich vein of literature, but also in heralding an important future research venture. She has cut one side of a literary-linguistic-ethnographic wedge that may yet dislodge the 'esoteric' stigma clinging to Amerindian verbal achievements.” —Ethnohistory Lúcia Sá is assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University. 320 pages | 1 map | 5-7/8 x 9 | 2004 Cultural Studies of the Americas Series, volume 16

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